584281

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MWC0010.1177/1750635215584281Media, War & ConflictKirkpatrick

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Article

Media, War & Conflict

Visuality, photography, and

2015, Vol. 8(2) 199­–212
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1750635215584281
theory: A review mwc.sagepub.com

Erika Kirkpatrick
University of Ottawa, Canada

Abstract
The way we see war – its visuality – is ever changing and dynamic. Despite the theoretical variety
in International Relations (IR) scholarship, the themes of visuality, photography, and media have
not been considered in a systematic fashion. The positivist core of IR is limited in its capacity
to consider these themes outside of a cause-and-effect framework. This results in media mainly
discussed in terms of its influence on international politics via its impact on (primarily American)
foreign policy. The media and foreign policy literature follows this legacy; it arose as a response
to post Cold War events and technological shifts. Similarly, the Revolution in Military Affairs
of the 1990s opened up a space for strategic studies to address media and visuality. Recent
literature from strategic studies engages with cultural and social theory in a way that shows how
such tools may be used for exploitation as well as emancipation. In opposition, the post-positivist
research tradition of critical IR theory problematizes the world created by rationalist–objectivist
social science and seeks answers to constitutive questions about the construction, production,
and performance of actors and structures in International Politics. Flowing from this, the visual
securitization program rejects the rationalism of the media and foreign policy literature, while still
investigating the links between media and decision-makers. Overall, critical IR theory has carved a
productive space for dealing with these themes by breaking away completely from the rationalist
legacy and putting forward a more hermeneutic – as opposed to positivistic – approach to the
subject. This review concludes that the way IR has so far dealt with these themes narrows our
field of vision and prevents us from envisioning the broader regime of representation of war
photography, a claim to be upheld in future research.

Keywords
international relations theory, media, photography, security studies, visuality, war photography

Corresponding author:
Erika Kirkpatrick, Faculty of Social Sciences Building, University of Ottawa, Room 7005, Ottawa ON
K1N6N5, Canada.
Email: ekirk040@uottawa.ca

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200 Media, War & Conflict 8(2)

Over the past decade and a half, the world has witnessed an explosion in visual tech-
nology and media. Advancements in information technology have linked the world
together in a revolutionary way. One has only to reflect on some key events of the past
15 years to realize the staggering implications this may hold for international politics:
9/11; the invasion of Iraq; jihadist videos; successive waves of violence in Gaza; the
Arab Spring; the war in Syria; and most recently the crisis in Ukraine – to name but a few
examples. These lead me to ask: what does the contemporary war photography landscape
look like? Throughout the past 160 years of war photography,1 pictures of the battlefield,
surrounding locale and the ‘home front’ have reached people in a multitude of different
ways – personal communication, newsreels, broadsheets and newspapers, magazines,
and eventually on television and via the internet.
The goal of my larger project is to map out at least a small segment of this contem-
porary war photography landscape and to make some suggestions as to what sorts of
‘conditions of possibility’ it may allow in terms of geopolitical engagements. Before
beginning my project, I set out to understand what my discipline of International
Relations (IR) has made of visuality, photography, and media. What follows here is a
review of the current state of the literature in IR on these three themes. This is by no
means to suggest that IR has a monopoly on studying the interstices of visuality, pho-
tography, media, and war. Indeed, many other disciplines such as communications stud-
ies, cultural studies, and history have at one time or another considered these themes;
this may in part account for their neglect in IR theory – they were being taken care of
elsewhere.
So what is so special, so peculiar, about IR as an academic discipline that this review
should be confined to its boundaries? I believe such a focus is warranted for at least two
reasons: the first has to do with the unique specialization of IR on the causes, conse-
quences, and dynamics of warfare. One would think that a discipline founded to deal
with mass violence and suffering on an international scale would devote some of its
resources to a discussion of the role of media and visuality therein. The second has to do
with timeliness: many scholars working under the heading of IR have been engaging
with these themes, especially since the turn of the new millennium. With this in mind, a
review of how the wider discipline has approached the subject at hand may provide other
scholars with a useful resource as they undertake their own projects. Likewise, it may
provide those working on these themes from outside IR with a useful introduction to the
discipline as they seek to contemplate the complexities of geopolitics and visuality.
One unintended and unfortunate consequence of such a focus – in the medium of a
review article – is the condensing of complex theories of international politics into brief
overviews, rather than a preferable nuanced engagement with their key epistemological,
ontological, and methodological claims. Furthermore, the ad hoc nature of the coverage
of my subject within IR has made reviewing the existing literature a challenge; I had to
make some difficult choices in leaving out many in the discipline that have engaged with
these themes. The following review is divided into two sections – based on epistemologi-
cal orientation. In the first section, I provide a brief account of the positivist core of the
discipline as an introduction to the media and foreign policy literature. Following this is
a review of the critical IR literature which has taken the form of a more hermeneutic or
interpretivist approach to scholarship, this is the post-positivist side of the discipline.

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Kirkpatrick 201

Throughout, it should be noted that for quite some time an engagement with the themes
of this review has not been a high priority for either of these broad streams of literature.
However, the purpose of this review is to demonstrate that despite this ‘gap’ IR has at
times lent itself to these thematics. Thus, future research under the disciplinary heading
of IR on the theses reviewed here would be a welcome addition to the field.
The bedrock of the positivist wing of IR is a belief in the capacity for scholars to use
factual evidence – gained via empirical observation – in order to arbitrate between rival
truth claims. Part and parcel of this desire is to establish and measure causality. Here, the
philosophical notion of objectivity forms a strong foundation. The assumption is that
there exists an independent reality from the human mind, making it therefore possible to
know the world and that reality from the stance of an independent observer. This approach
to scholarship rests on the (I think mistaken) belief that the only way the social sciences
can find legitimacy is via mimicry of the natural sciences – particularly by applying
quantitative methods to empirical data. This reflects ‘a relatively narrow … and exclu-
sive understanding of social science’ (Bleiker, 2001: 519) and in the case of IR asserts the
capacity for scholars to study balances of power in the same way a (Newtonian) physicist
would study gravity. Out of the various positivist-influenced approaches in IR, rational
choice theory has come to dominate the mainstream in many respects. This approach
‘treats actors as rational, self-interested maximizers of utility’ and ‘models behavior on
the basis of fixed, and pregiven identities and interests’ (Smith, 2004: 502) – a set of
assumptions which leads to a particularly narrow research agenda when it comes to
media, photography, and visuality.
By sharing the core assumptions of rationalism and objectivism (Morgenthau et al.,
2007), mainstream IR theories and the literature they have influenced – reviewed fur-
ther below – are limited in the ways in which they could possibly approach these
themes. This is because particular ‘perspectives and people [are] excluded from pre-
vailing purviews’ as are ‘the emotional nature and consequences of political events’
(Bleiker, 2009: 2) when rational-objectivism is the driving force behind theories of
world politics. In such approaches the existence of an observable external reality is
taken as a given. The primary way in which humans are able to observe this external
reality is through their senses – vision being principal among them. The logical exten-
sion of this in terms of photography is an understanding of photographs as unmediated
snapshots of that external reality. Capturing a particular place and time, and – crucially
in terms of international politics – recording particular events and providing evidence
(Kennedy, 2012: 306) that they happened.
In line with one of the core realist theories of IR, Hans Morgenthau et al. (2007: 273)
assumed that there are no universal moral principles uniting humankind beyond simplis-
tic survival motives, from which they concluded that public opinion inspired by a global
media would be impossible. Thus, from the very outset there was a restriction on consid-
ering the media in IR; ironically, this debuted at a time when mass media was gaining in
scope and popularity. This restriction continued through the Cold War period.
Furthermore, because states are the primary ontological unit in many positivist IR theo-
ries – particularly neorealism and neoliberalism – the media can only be considered in
very particular ways – principally, through the measurement/assessment of how it can
influence or impact the state, and by extension international politics, through foreign

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202 Media, War & Conflict 8(2)

policy. A rival approach to the ‘neo/neo synthesis’ is complex interdependence theory

(Keohane and Nye, 1977). One of its core assumptions is that far from living in a self-
help system there are actually multiple channels connecting states. In this view, media
could be approached as a transnational channel connecting societies and facilitating
communication, for example through ‘media diplomacy’.2
Scholars dealing in broad terms with media and foreign policy arose as a response to
concrete events in world politics and technological advancements in information tech-
nology that revolutionized media in the latter half of the 20th century (Robinson, 2002:
2). The ending of the Cold War removed the rationale of superpower rivalry around
which the United States had fashioned its foreign policy for decades. This, combined
with the increased capacity for real-time reportage and the development of the 24-hour
news cycle in the 1990s (pp. 7–8), led to a consideration of the media in IR to match its
increased presence in international affairs.
In general, this literature combines insights from the rationalist–objectivist core of IR
and political science, as well as communications studies. From the assumptions of much
of mainstream IR theory and political science is the goal of measuring, assessing, or
otherwise discussing causation in terms of the influence of media on foreign policy ana-
lysts or decision-makers (Hoge, 1994; Seib, 1997). Furthermore, the legacy of state
supremacy in international politics is at the heart of this literature – the express goal of
which is to investigate the relationship between media and the state as it pertains to for-
eign policy (Hoge, 1994: 142). This literature draws on communications studies to aid in
categorizing different perspectives on media–state relationships in the domestic realm.
These perspectives, which are then extrapolated to foreign policy and international poli-
tics, are:

liberal pluralism [which] sees the media as an independent institution fulfilling important
political functions … [such as] ‘watchdog’… [a] politically influential conservative variant …
[that] sees news media as … power-seeking institutions populated by left-liberal journalists …
[and] a radical school … [that] regards the media as indirectly but systematically subordinate
to capital and the state. (Hackett, 1997: 142)

Specifically, within this body of literature one of the most debated theses is the ‘CNN
effect’. Like much of the media and foreign policy literature, work on the CNN effect is
rationalist–objectivist at its core and thus concerned with assessing the influence and
impact of media on (American) foreign policy decision-making (Livingston, 1997;
Robinson, 2002, 2011). The term CNN effect is used quite often, but has a variety of
meanings, thus I use the term the ‘CNN-effect thesis’ here. As a sub-set of literature this
covers those that engage with the term ‘CNN effect’, and those concerned specifically
with the progression of media influencing foreign policy via its impact – whether actual
or perceived – on public opinion.
Within this literature Piers Robinson and Steven Livingston appear as two key authors.
Robinson’s book The CNN Effect (1999) is a good example of what Robert Cox (1981:
128–129) has termed problem-solving theory, a form of scholarship that ‘takes the world
as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into
which they are organised, as the given framework for action’. In his book, Robinson

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Kirkpatrick 203

(1999) seeks to either prove or disprove the existence of the CNN effect within a reality
that is given and accepted; he does not attempt to address the state–society relations and
power dynamics behind the effect. In his early work, he concludes the CNN effect exists,
but that there are multiple effects at play and ultimately the relationship between media
and foreign policy is dependent on degrees of ‘policy certainty’ within the government
(p. 25). Building onto this, in his more recent interventions he insists that ‘research into
the impact of media … needs to be done with due attention to the multiplicity of non-
media processes that shape political actions and outcomes’ (Robinson, 2011: 6). The
challenge then, is not just proving or disproving the existence of an effect, but assessing
and measuring any possible effects in relations to other complex phenomena in global
politics. However, the essential goal of measuring media influence remains a central
tenet of Robinson’s arguments (pp. 6–7).
While maintaining the central theme of influence, Robinson does make several sug-
gestions on the future scope of CNN-effect research. First of all, he argues that despite
the rational–objectivist philosophical scope of this body of literature most of the stud-
ies are simply not quantitative enough – Robinson would like future research to har-
ness statistical methods such as regression analysis in conjunction with ‘the qualitatively
rich and valid findings emerging from detailed case study analysis’ (p. 9). He also
suggests that scholars maintain the thematic of influence, while broadening its scope
to include more subtle forms of influence as opposed simply to the possibility of influ-
ence on policy makers – such as through the selection of policy based on possible
media friendliness.
Like Robinson, in his early work, Livingston (1997: 10–11) also concluded that mul-
tiple CNN effects exist: the media can act as accelerant, impediment, or agenda setter.
Robinson’s book can be viewed as an extension and critique of Livingston’s (1997: 10)
arguments. A key feature of Livingston’s work that Robinson picks up on is his categori-
zation of degrees of media interest, effects, impact on public opinion, and government
relationship to media by type of military intervention (Livingston, 1997: 11; Robinson,
2002). This is by far the most nuanced explanation of the CNN effect in terms of differ-
ent effects being tied to different levels of ‘policy certainty’ as reflected by foreign policy
decisions. This presents the CNN effect as a two-way street in which the media both
effects and is affected by government policy makers. Again, like Robinson, Livingston’s
more recent work shifts his approach slightly – away from direct policy–influence con-
siderations and toward the subtler category of the importance of non-state actors in
global politics (Livingston, 2011: 21). To achieve this, he suggests that scholars focus on
‘the relationship between governance, on the one hand, and information and communi-
cation technology (ICT) on the other’ (p. 21, emphases in original). Even with such
moves, CNN-effect literature can still be placed within the philosophical traditions of
rationalist–objectivist social science, with the notion of measuring influence being
moved to a different ‘level of analysis’ – that of the influence of the ICT environment on
the various actors involved in global governance.
Early discussions of the CNN effect often take place in the context of a set of national-
ist, ethnic, and civil conflicts that occurred in the early 1990s at the end of the Cold War
in eastern Europe and east Africa, particularly in Bosnia (Livingston, 1997; Robinson,
2002) and Somalia (Livingston, 1997; Livingston and Eachus, 1995; Mermin, 1997;

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204 Media, War & Conflict 8(2)

Robinson, 2002). While many take seriously the ability of media to drive and influence
foreign policy, others concentrate on debunking the ‘myth’ of such an effect, instead
arguing that it is far more likely that foreign policy decision makers drive the news media
rather than the other way around. Using a mixed methods approach combining a quanti-
tative assessment of airplay and story length, combined with thin descriptions to estab-
lish framing of the Somalia crisis by big American networked television (ABC, CBS,
NBC, and CNN), Jonathan Mermin (1997: 403) concludes that although television ‘is
clearly a player in the foreign policy arena … the evidence from Somalia is that journal-
ists set the news agenda and frame the stories they report in close collaboration with
actors in Washington’, thus rendering the CNN effect as, at best, a mutually constitutive
element in American foreign policy and, at worst, a complete myth.
Indeed, critics of CNN-effect scholarship argue that it has appeared as little more
than a distraction in the study of media and international politics (Gilboa, 2005: 326).
Gilboa goes as far as to categorize the CNN effect as ‘highly exaggerated’, ‘highly
questionable’ and ‘just an attractive neologism’. He argues that ‘no sufficient evi-
dence has yet been presented to validate the CNN effect hypothesis’ and outlines a
potential method of comparative analysis that could remedy the perceived lack of
empirical evidence in the literature – by assessing the impact of global TV networks
on specific foreign-policy decisions in comparison to other factors, and by then apply-
ing that procedure to multiple cases (p. 334). By way of concluding his critique, he
insists that technological innovations necessitate that further research be conducted
into media and international politics (p. 337); however, it is clear from his work that
this research should take a specific form of empirical analysis in line with the rational–
objectivist legacy of this body of literature.
In the 1990s, American foreign policy priorities changed drastically when the armed
forces underwent a ‘revolution in military affairs’ that reoriented the priorities of an all
volunteer force in a time of American preponderance (see Der Derian, 2009). Without
the looming shadow of mutually assured destruction, or the potential of a large-scale
conventional war between rival superpowers, the American military began to reorient
itself toward new types of operations – especially on the heels of the ‘success’ of
Operation Desert Storm. These shifts in policy and practice opened up a space for schol-
ars to engage with media impact on military operations, as well as those concerned with
foreign policy reviewed above.
Analysts and scholars within the military itself have been concerned with the media
and public opinion, as long as there have been military campaigns. Top of the list of
concerns has always been media (defined broadly as a means of information exchange)
as a weapon – including its possible psychological effects on the ‘home front’ and sol-
diers alike. In the contemporary era, the perceived effect that the media had on the
American military and foreign policy apparatus during the Vietnam War has dictated the
way the American military interacts with media and how they allow war to be covered.
The assertion that the media undermined support for the Vietnam War by broadcasting
the returning dead has been accepted by officials in the military, and impacted how they
allowed future wars to be covered (Hoskins, 2004). This was especially apparent in the
First Gulf War, and the legacy has equally impacted coverage of the two major conflicts
of the 21st century – the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (pp. 14–15).

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Kirkpatrick 205

Within this subset of strategic studies scholars, a novel approach has appeared in mili-
tary publications in the early 21st century since the inception of the Global War on Terror.
Even though they have always been concerned with the media, and cognizant of its role
in military operations, strategic studies scholars are now publishing on ways to help the
United States win, not just the ground wars and the war for hearts and minds in the
Global War on Terror,3 but on how to increase their ‘visual literacy’ (Gurri et al., 2010:
102) to win the ‘infowar’4 (Der Derian, 2003, 2009). For the most part, this new litera-
ture rejects some of the assumptions of the rationalist–objectivist paradigm on which
much of strategic studies and foreign policy studies are based.
A good example of a concerted effort within the military establishment to increase
‘visual literacy’ and close the ‘visual information gap facing analysts and decision-mak-
ers’ (Gurri et al., 2010: 103) is the Combating Terrorism Center’s Islamic Imagery
Project – ‘the first comprehensive cataloguing of the most important and recurring
images used in jihadi literature’ (2006: 1) filling a perceived gap in empirical data. The
CTC laments the engagement with pre-modern art by historians and museums, claiming
that there is a lack of information on modern violent jihadi images – which they associate
with ‘political Islam’ (p. 5). This is part of a wider concern in the military establishment
with the rise of ‘infowar’ or ‘netwar’ (Der Derian, 2003, 2009) wherein new media and
technologies are perceived as part of Islamic terrorists’ arsenal. Awan (2010) dubs this
the ‘virtual jihad’ – the uploading and sharing of terrorist training videos and propaganda
to the internet through web 2.0 platforms like file sharing, blogs, and social networks.
Interestingly, this literature seems to be engaging with cultural theory and social the-
ory in its approach to visuality – such as in Gurri et al.’s (2010) proposed methodology
for policy analysts to increase their visual literacy, which includes the analysis of ‘master
narratives’; and Awan’s (2010: 10) concern with the ability of web 2.0 to level ‘hierar-
chies of knowledge and power’. These articles demonstrate how, at least the tools of,
critical theory can be used just as effectively in the quest for exploitation, control, and
dominance – for what else would ‘winning’ in the global war on terror entail – as it can
in the quest for emancipation.
Unlike the positivist influenced theories of mainstream IR, post-positivist challengers
focus not on the causes of events in international politics, but rather on constitutive ques-
tions of meaning construction, production and performance. This is what Cox (1981:
129) termed ‘critical theory’ in IR,

critical in the sense that it stands apart from the prevailing order of the world and asks how that
order came about … [it] does not take institutions and social and power relations for granted
but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they
might be in the process of changing.

Essentially, post-positivist IR tasks itself with understanding how things come to be in

the international, and indeed how the international has come to be. Particularly, early works
focused on the role that IR theory itself played in creating its world (see, for example,
Ashley, 1984). This is in stark contrast to positivist theories ‘licensed by an empiricist
methodology, focuse[d] … on explaining’ (Smith, 2004: 510) things from a preconceived,
‘neutral’, ‘value-free’, ‘objective’, position, to the detriment of understanding the

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206 Media, War & Conflict 8(2)

construction, production and performance of the actors and structures involved in world
politics. As Smith reminds us, ‘the social world … is not something that we observe, it is
something we inhabit, and we can never stand in relationship to it as neutral observer …
there is no view from nowhere’ (p. 513). Despite the significant diversity within the post-
positivist wing of the discipline, all scholars working in this tradition take Smith’s admon-
ishment seriously.
The literature reviewed below, under the simple and broad heading of critical IR has
been influenced by this goal of challenging rationalist–objectivist social science. This
has allowed critical scholars in IR to carve out a productive space for engaging with visu-
ality, photography and media outside of the express goals of measuring and assessing the
influence of media on foreign policy decision making, and/or global governance. These
challengers can be loosely labeled ‘postmodern’5 because they defy ‘the grand theories
or definitive structures which impose rationalist identities or binary oppositions to
explain international relations’ such as those of mainstream ‘rationalist’ approaches (Der
Derian, 1990: 297). Within this body of literature there is a diversity of interventions and
engagements with photographs and media in international politics, ranging from: the role
images play in securitization; the representation of ‘humanitarian disasters’ (HIV/AIDS,
famine, natural disasters); the ethics of photojournalism and media consumption; prac-
tices of war photography; the politics of witness and evidence; and the politics of pho-
tography itself.
In considering the place of images in securitizing processes, the visual securitization
literature continues the work, in part, of the mainstream foreign policy literature reviewed
above in that they are also preoccupied with exploring the relationship (rather than meas-
uring influence) between media and the actions of decision-makers – in terms of secu-
ritizing processes (Hansen, 2011; Schlag and Heck, 2013). However, because
securitization theory has undergone a transformation in recent years toward a more soci-
ologically oriented approach (Balzacq, 2010), they do not approach the study of media
and international politics through the rationalist–objectivist lens of the mainstream lit-
erature. Two articles stand out as key works within the visual securitization literature:
‘Theorizing the image for securitization theory’ by Lene Hansen (2011) and ‘Securitizing
images: The female body and the war in Afghanistan’ by Gabi Schlag and Axel Heck
(2013). Both attempted to provide a new methodological approach for studying visuals
under the securitization theory program, and in IR more generally.
Hansen (2011: 52) argues that ‘images “speak security”’ and aims to theorize how, by
studying four components: the image itself, the immediate intertext,6 the wider policy
discourse, and the texts ascribing meaning to the image (p. 53). The four components are
then subject to three analytical categories of empirical analysis: ‘immediacy’ – the poten-
tial for an image to provoke ‘immediate emotional responses’; ‘circulability’ – images
can circulate faster than words, and thus reach a wider audience faster; and ‘ambiguity’
– an interpretive gap between an image and a collective identity; and the inability of
images to make specific policy demands (pp. 55–59). Hansen then applies this method to
the Muhammed cartoon crisis. Schlag and Heck (2013: 2) draw on iconology to present
a method for ‘understanding how (in)securities are visually constructed and wars are
delegitimized’. This approach highlights desecuritization processes, and presents a
threefold iconological method for studying visual (de)securitization. The three stages

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Kirkpatrick 207

are: ‘the pre-iconic description’; ‘the iconographic analysis’; and the ‘iconological inter-
pretation’ of images (p. 9). This approach is then applied to an empirical analysis of a
TIME magazine cover featuring a photograph from the war in Afghanistan.7
Although the authors disagree on what to study under the securitization research pro-
gram – ‘desecuritization’8 or ‘securitization’ – both highlight the important role images
play in these processes. Furthermore, they approach images from a similar epistemologi-
cal understanding, making them less concerned with demonstrating causation and more
concerned with interpreting the role of visuality in desecuritization/securitization pro-
cesses. As such, Hansen (2011: 52) insists that we approach the ‘visual as an ontologi-
cal–political condition rather than a variable’ – such a move points us toward the
representative politics of visual imagery. By framing visual information as an ontologi-
cal category to be deconstructed, rather than as a variable to be simply counted, Hansen
points toward the difficulties inherent in trying to measure the influence of visual images
on securitization processes. Likewise, Schlag and Heck (2013: 8) also prefer a ‘relational
ontology … [wherein] images are as much the producers of their reality as they are its
products’. Thus, both of these works highlight an engagement with critical theory that is
manifestly lacking in the mainstream media and foreign policy literature.
Like those working under the securitization program, many post-positivist IR theo-
rists, inspired by the philosophy of Michel Foucault and other post-Marxists, engage
with questions of language and discourse. We can very loosely label this ‘poststructural-
ism’; a key author who stands out in this approach is David Campbell. Throughout the
past decade his work has focused almost exclusively on visuality, photography, and
media.9 After spending the late 1980s and 1990s engaging with questions of international
political theory, ethics, identity, and security, in the early 2000s Campbell turned his
attention toward photography in an edited book chapter ‘Salgado and the Sahel’ (2003b).
The chapter engaged with issues of mediation and politics of representation in documen-
tary photography, using the work of Sabastiao Salgado in North Africa as a backdrop.
Campbell critiqued these types of images as portraying ‘a particular kind of helplessness
that reinforces colonial relations of power’ (p. 70). He also discussed the difference
between images and words, specifically in terms of the speed/immediacy of images (p.
71),10 and the power of photographs in our understandings of strangers (p. 83). This rep-
resents the beginning of a repeated engagement with the photographing of ‘Africa’ and
other postcolonial sites, such as Gaza in Campbell’s work (see Campbell, 2009).
Simultaneously, in a two-part journal article ‘Atrocity, memory and photography’
(Campbell, 2002a, 2002b), he engaged with a media lawsuit over the political impact of
the representations of camps in the Bosnian War. Campbell showed how assumptions
about the ‘impact of particular images is … a good deal more problematic than assumed
by impoverished accounts of a causal relationship between pictures and policy’
(Campbell, 2002b: 160) – bound up as they are with affective issues of individual and
collective memory11 – in this case, of the Holocaust and photographs of the camps and
ghettos. This highlights a common theme stretching throughout Campbell’s work on
visuality, photography, and media: a critique of causal explanations, and the advance-
ment of a more ‘hermeneutic’12 approach to these themes.
As with his earlier work in IR and security studies (see, particularly, Campbell, 1992),
his approach to studying media has followed several ‘turns’: the turn to postmodernism/

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208 Media, War & Conflict 8(2)

poststructuralism; the turn to discourse; and the turn to aesthetics and materiality. A key
theme appearing throughout his work is a consideration of the way media cover war and
the consequences of this coverage (Campbell, 2003a, 2003c, 2009, 2012). His work over
the past decade has been toward detangling the ‘stickiness of the web of meaning’ (Der
Derian, 1990: 297) that is international politics. This has culminated in a complex web-
based project entitled ‘Visual Storytelling: Creative Practice and Criticism’ (www.david-
campbell.org). With this project he has moved out of the shadow of the academic
discipline of IR and into the realm of the public intellectual, harnessing the power of new
media to disseminate his work.
Campbell is not unique in his focus on visuality. Many IR scholars have taken up the
research puzzles he suggested in the article ‘Geopolitics and visuality’ in 2007: how to
theorize visuality as a form of knowledge; the impact of philosophical understandings of
visuality for understanding photography; and photojournalism as a technology of visual-
ity that helps establish the ‘conditions of possibility for geopolitics’ (Campbell, 2007:
358). In an attempt to consider how HIV/AIDS in Africa is represented, Bleiker and Kay
(2007) engage with all three puzzles. They argue that photographs are political, and that
such dynamics become more acute when photographs enter mass media (p. 140). This
line of thought shows acceptance of the groundwork laid by mainstream theorists who
argue that photos influence policy, but rejects attempts to measure this influence, prefer-
ring a more hermeneutical approach akin to Cox’s definition of critical theory.
The key point they make is that different methods of photography embody different
forms of representation, giving meaning to political phenomena surrounding an image
(p. 140). They identify three archetypes of photography: naturalist, humanist, and plural-
ist. Naturalist photography tries to reflect an objective reality by remaining neutral and
value free. Humanist photography tries to invoke compassion and social change by pho-
tographing human suffering; it entails a normative element. Pluralist photography shares
the normative goals of humanist photography, except in an emancipatory sense wherein
iconic representations from outside are rejected and the focus is on situated practices as
they create multiple sites of representation (pp. 140–141). They argue that these different
methods allow/disallow particular types of politics and therefore different responses to
international political events like war, famine, and disease (pp. 149–151). Bleiker and
Kay’s approach theorizes how photography establishes different conditions of possibility
for geopolitics, such as how different photographic representations of AIDS in Africa
may engender different types of international engagement (see also Campbell, 1998). Of
the three archetypes, Bleiker and Kay present pluralist photography as having the most
promise for challenging entrenched understandings of international political problems
like the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
This line of thought leads some to find renewed hope in new media and new technolo-
gies as they increase the capacity for pluralist photography in the form of citizen-journal-
ism. Frank Möller (2010: 501–502) locates this form of pluralist photography outside the
political economy of photojournalism but within the liberal ethic of humanitarianism that
drives the ‘photojournalist dream’ of exposing horrors in order to drive social action
(Campbell, 2009: 7–8). Campbell’s critique of this ‘dream’ isolates three interrelated
problems: first, it is nearly impossible to show when/where the dream has been realized,
that is, demonstrating causation between pictures and policy;13 second, perpetrators of

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Kirkpatrick 209

atrocities and human rights violations are cognizant of the ‘photojournalists’ dream’ and
yet continue to commit these types of acts anyway; and finally there is a contradiction
between the ethics of engagement/social change/intervention and the epistemology of
objectivism. This last point has always been part of photography (Campbell, 2009: 8–9).
These three problems are further complicated by the effects of the global political econ-
omy on media, which dictate what can be shown (‘taste and decency’) while simultane-
ously being driven by the paradigm of immediacy wherein the insatiable appetite of the
24-hour news cycle demands constant coverage.
According to Möller (2010: 510), photography can engender social change most
effectively when decoupled from this political economy through citizen-journalists: peo-
ple ‘who [do not] … take photographs … solely for commercial purposes … [and who]
understand their activities as political acts in search for social change’. Whether those
acting as ‘citizen-journalists’ all view their activities in this way is debatable. Campbell
(2003c: 72) argues that ‘photograph[s] … require [the] … overt and committed politics
of a photojournalist’, suggesting that the economy of the media is not the most limiting
factor in the emancipatory potential of photojournalism. Rather, Campbell presents the
aesthetic strategy of documentary realism as an intrinsic limit – this is apparent in both
naturalist and humanist methods of photography – requiring specificity: a dead person, a
bombed building, a starving child. He argues that if this is combined with the paradigm
of immediacy regulating media conduct, premised on the idea that the truth of a conflict
can be found at a particular time and place, the result is the disappearance of many of the
political dynamics of the particular event depicted in the image, thus narrowing and con-
stricting the ‘conditions of possibility’ for not just (geo)political engagement, but also
limiting the public’s political literacy for interrogating geopolitical events.
These intrinsic limits of photojournalism are paralleled by the intrinsic limits of cur-
rent studies in IR on media, visuality, and photography. The overwhelming focus on
single images, or on small numbers of images/cases narrows our field of vision and
prevents us from envisioning the broader regime of representation of war photography.
The collective unconscious of a society is ‘made visible by the photograph[s]’ it pro-
duces and consumes (Brothers, 1997: 27). Examining a wide array of war photographs
from different media ‘can help expose the collective attitudes of the society’ consuming
them. If we begin from a poststructural definition of the state, wherein its ontological
status is dependent upon processes of ‘reproduction that performatively constitutes’ the
state’s identity (Campbell, 2003a: 57), a project which maps even a small portion of the
war photography landscape can help us unpack these performative dynamics.
The academic discipline of IR was founded in the 20th century with the goal of sys-
tematically studying international politics – in particular, how to limit war and promote
and manage peace. Many things have changed since the catastrophic world wars, but the
occurrence of violent conflict and the need to study the many facets of it has not.
Advances in information technology have rendered international, or perhaps more accu-
rately ‘global’, politics more visible to more people, more immediately than ever before.
No doubt this state of affairs will inspire much scholarship in the decades to come in
fields as diverse as history, cultural studies, communications, art and design, anthropol-
ogy and sociology, and computer sciences – the list could go on. What I have sought to
provide in this review article is a potential resource for such future research. By

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210 Media, War & Conflict 8(2)

reviewing the current state of the literature in IR on the themes of visuality, photography,
and media I hope to have demonstrated that the most useful and interesting work that is
taking place in the current period is occurring under the post-positivist/interpretivist
research tradition. This is to highlight the legitimacy of such studies under the discipli-
nary heading of IR, and by extension political science. Furthermore, it is my hope that
those dealing with the interstices of political violence, media, and visuality from outside
IR and political science will take seriously the contributions of the scholars reviewed
above – from both epistemological traditions – in their own research agendas.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
  1. Dated from the Crimean War 1853–1856.
  2. A term encompassing its own rich body of literature from the 1980s and 1990s, which I did
not have time or space to consider here, but which could easily have fallen within the purview
of this article.
  3. By, for example, travelling around rural Afghanistan with a laptop, projector and a bed sheet
and using them to show the population footage of the 9/11 attacks on the WTC (Avondoglio,
2011).
 4.
… the meaning of infowar shifts with escalating phases of violence. In its most basic and
material form, infowar is an adjunct of conventional war, in which command and control
of the battlefield is augmented by computers, communications, and intelligence. At the next
remove, infowar is a supplement of military violence, in which information technologies are
used to further the defeat of a foreign opponent and the support of a domestic population.
In its purest, most immaterial form, infowar is warring without war, an epistemic battle for
reality in which opinions, beliefs, and decisions are created and destroyed by a contest of
networked information and communication systems. (Der Derian, 2003: 46)

  5. Although I recognize the problematic nature of this term (see Campbell, 2007).
  6. Here the notion of intertextuality appears. This is the ‘accumulation of meanings across dif-
ferent texts, where one image refers to another, or has its meaning altered by being “read” in
the context of other images’ (Hall, 2001: 232).
  7. To avoid sensationalizing the particular cover, I am ambiguous here but I encourage readers
to view the original article.
 8. Linked to the Critical Security Studies program that stresses emancipation and human
security.
  9. It is with this corpus that my work aims to engage most closely.
10. Echoed in Hansen’s (2011) method.
11. See the discussion of ‘intertextuality’ below.
12. As opposed to positivist.
13. As the mainstream literature attempts.

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Author biography
Erika Kirkpatrick is a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa’s School of Political Studies. Her
research interests include the role of news media in international politics, particularly the perfor-
mance of the state in western media war photography. Additional research interests include the
possibilities offered by Affect Theory and cultural studies for critical International Relations
Theory.

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